B2B Marketing Experiences

And that’s where this little idea comes into play:  creating video in B2B is not expensive, difficult or cumbersome ;-)

That little idea

Which video’s have the biggest effect on people ? Often marketers look at themselves when they need answers, and although that’s not always a good idea, in this case I think the answer is pretty straightforward:

• Unique videos: because of the graphical style, scenery or unique setting, they become special.
• Authentic videos: because of the setting, the people, and the topic, it is overly clear that the contents is special.
• Funny videos: we all know the effect of those.

Now each of these 3 video’s can be produced expensively, can consume a lot of time, and might have not enough effect. Unique video’s are viewed and shared, just because they are unique. But that does not mean the video will position you as a thought leader, or that it will bring you leads. The same goes for funny videos: people might even not get what you are trying to communicate, it’s just funny and they’ll view and share.

But what really resonates with people is AUTHENTICITY. Videos that help them solve their business issues, or provide them with information they need to make better business decisions.

What would happen if you start producing videos about customers that are actually using our products, in which you interview them and let them tell how they are actually using your products, and how it is helping their business? These videos are simple, non-glossy and little polished recordings.

What’s in this post?

This post is a practical guide (promised !), with multiple pages of hints-n-tips.

• Page 1 : Introduction (that’s this page)
• Page 2 : How to create effective B2B video’s, without high costs?
• Page 3 : Types of video formats you can create
• Page 4 : Where and how do I publish these video’s ?
• Page 5 : What questions do I ask during interviews ?
• Page 6 : What kind of answers you want from interviews

Page 2: How to create effective B2B video’s, without high costs?

Your marketing team can create interviews with your customers:

• Create video interviews with your customers on how they use your products, why they bought it, but in a podcast style. The advantages are clear: faster, cheaper, and more authentic.
• Do not make the videos too stiff, because nobody wants to view yet another polished corporate advertisement. Instead, viewers want to receive information, and at the same time be amused. Usually your buyers already will have heard about the topic. By using humour you do not make the boring topic even more boring to them. It also improves your image as a company in being different and fun to work with. After all, you are communicating to people, you are dealing with humans: it’s OK to have fun.

Your customers could create videos and stories:

• You can motivate your customers to produce their own video testimonials, by giving an incentive in which the most appealing and fun testimonials make it to your website and your annual customer/partner conference. Typically engineers or specialists are the guys who would go through the trouble to make such videos. And these are the profiles you need, as they are more authentic testimonials than any other. A great way to provide an incentive to people is to give them free iTunes downloads as a prize or a subscription to a premium account on Spotify (www.spotify.com): these type of prizes allows them to immediately benefit from their prize, and they have more freedom on how to fill it in. Other incentives can be e.a. an invitation to a tradeshow including travel and lodging.

Your account managers making videos:

• When your account managers are visiting a friendly customer, they could ask for a very short interview in which they ask some of the below questions (and notquestions about how happy they are with your company):
  • What is the business you are in?
  • What products and applications are you offering to your customers?
  • In which applications are you using our products? Which products?
  • Why are you using our products?
  • What problems where you facing, that made you choose for our products?
  • ….

These interviews can be conducted with a simple digital photo-camera, or with a descent smartphone. If you want to use an HD camera, go ahead: they are not expensive these days, and easy to work with.

Legal implications? Don’t worry, this simple trick will help you

In case you are worried about legal implications when recording and publishing interviewed customers on the internet, here’s an easy way to solve that: when you press the record button on your video camera, simply ask the person you are interviewing if it is OK that you post the video on your website.

In that way the agreement is on video, and there is no need to have any communication back and forward between the company legal advisors and your company. During the video editing process, you cut and save those statements, done!

If you think your products lend themselves for “quick product demonstrations”, then go for it. Showing is very important in B2B, and video is the ideal medium to do so.

Why not have a product manager or a technical architect of your company explain the highlights of a certain product while handling the product in real life, explaining where the products are used, and what problems it solves.

I am sure if a customer can choose to go through a boring commercial PDF file, which he might not do, or instead have a look at a 1-3 minutes video, he will go for the last option.

You could creating videos part of your product marketing launch process so that with every new product launch you also have a video to go with it. You could call it “View from the engineer” or similar and have it featured on your blog, or on your corporate website.

I do not have the time to create video’s !

The ideas in the introduction are examples on how you could go about in creating that video content. But where do you start, now, in 2012 ?

How can you realise this on top of our already busy shedule ?

The answer is rather simple: step by step. First start with the things that you can easily implement with limited resources, and with easy to do topics that you can produce in-house.

Once you have a little bit experience in producing this in-house produced video’s, you can gradually move into producing video’s (still made by your own people, so not out-sourced) that are more interviews of customers, thought leaders and key industry players.

Another easy to do video is interviewing a VP of Sales, or a Product Manager, or multiple product managers, who are at a tradeshow, and ask them some questions relevant to our buyers.

My learnings (this one really solves a lot of time and can be inexpensive)

I learned that it is easier to just shoot the raw video, and then have the video professionally edited and finished by a company that knows what they are doing. They can create a professional start (“ a bumper”) of the video, and add text to the video (“SVO’s”).

• Page 3 : Types of video formats you can create
• Page 4 : Where and how do I publish these video’s ?
• Page 5 : What questions do I ask during interviews ?
• Page 6 : What kind of answers you want from interviews

2 Types of Video Formats can be possible:

No questions, only answers

After an nice intro “bumper”, created for each type of video (product, company, technology, customer), immediately the viewer can see the interviewee answering a question, without first hearing the question of the interviewer. In the beginning of the video the name and title of the interviewee + location can be put in subtitle text.

The interviewee starts each sentence with a “hook” so the viewer immediately understands which questions was asked.

The video should also contain a permanent small logo of your company for branding purposes.

e.a. My name is XXX and I work for company YYY.

e.a. The most challenging part of our business is ZZZ.

e.a. An interesting project we have done in 2011 is QQQ.

Q&A format

After the intro “bumper”, the interviewee is welcomed in a warm and personal manner e.a. “Hi John”. The location can be mentioned like ‘Welcome here at tradeshow XXXX’.

Also here, the video should also contain a permanent small logo for branding purposes.

From there, a normal question and answer format is executed, ending with an nice outtro.

• Page 4 : Where and how do I publish these video’s ?
• Page 5 : What questions do I ask during interviews ?
• Page 6 : What kind of answers you want from interviews

All our videos should be published on your website, while they are actually hosted on your Youtube channel.

With every video, create a short description (for SEO reasons !) that goes with the video, consisting of the following elements:

• Title: a good title is crucial. Keep it SHORT, INFORMATIVE, and ON TOPIC.
• Description: in the description, add max 100 words about what people can see in the video. Make sure to include important keywords that peole might search for on Google. Also, if relevant, include the names and functions of the people that are on the video.
• URLs: make sure to add enough links to relevant product pages, external pages, LinkedIn profiles, etc…
• Tags: as with keywords, consider what search keywords you’d want your video to come up as a result for, and then ad those keywords as tags. Also use the names of the people and the names of the companies that appear in the video.

In this part of this post, I have listed lot’s of questions you can ask during interviews. I’ve split them into the following type of questions:

• Technology: if you have an interview about a certain technology
• Product: an interview about a product
• Customer: an interview with a customer
• Events: an interview before, during and after an event.

Technology Focus – questions

If you are into technology, these are some questions you can ask. I’ve split them into explain questions and show questions. “Explain” is where you want people to explain something, and “Show” is where you want people to show you something (waauuww, difficult isn’t it ?).

Questions asked to one of your Engineers:

–        Explain questions:

• Tell me something more about Technology X?
• What’s special in your eyes?
• What where the design requirements for you when you started working on this technology?
• What was the most challenging part about building this new technology into <<<product X>>>? Why ?
• What was the most important challenge when developing this new technology ? Why ?
• What other techniques/technologies did you use to power this new technology?
• If you compare it to Technology Z, in what way is this technology different ?
• I understand this technology does <<< this and that and this >>>>. How was that functionality implemented?
• How long did it take to develop this technology?
• How long did it take to develop this technology into this product?
• I understand it was not easy to overcome <<<problem>>>. Which design decisions did you had to make to counter <<<problem >>> ?
• How are we testing this technology in this lab?
• What kind of simulations where done to test this technology?
• What does the future hold for this technology?
• What kind of processing power does it require to run this technology?
• Can existing customers upgrade there equipment to include this new technology?
• Who else was involved in creating this technology?

–        Show questions:

• Can you show me the core element of the technology design? What functions does it serve?
• Can you show me the difference between Technology A and B ?
• Can you open the lid so we can have a look inside? What is the most interesting part of the design?
• Can you show me some of interesting design elements ? why is that interesting?
• How did you build in the reliability you want for your technology/products?
• What did you yourself make? What is your contribution to this technology?

Questions for the marketer/product manager:

–        Explain questions:

• What does it do?
• Can you name the 3 most important benefits for our customers? Why is that ?
• Which customers / markets / applications can benefit from this technology? Why ?
• Why would anybody need this technology?
• When do you think it makes sense to start looking at this technology?
• Why did we develop this technology?
• Is anybody using this technology already today? What where the results?
• What money does it save? How much?
• Is there a cost involved?
• What problems does it solve? How ?
• Why is this technology good news for your customers?
• What does it take to get this technology?
• How did we test this?
• Can you explain the technology in one phrase ?
• Where can your viewers find more information?

–        Show questions:

• Can you show me exactly how the technology works? (drawing on whiteboard)
• Can you show me the benefits for the end-users?
• Can you show me a typical set-up in which this technology is used?

Product Focus – questions

Questions for the Engineer:

–        “Explain” questions:

• Tell me something more about this product?
• What are the interfaces on this product?
• What are the main functions of this product?
• Where does this product fit into the <<< market >>>?
• What’s special in your eyes about this product?
• What do you think is a handy feature/element of this product?
• What where the design requirements for you when you started working on this products?
• What was the most challenging part about building this new product? Why ?
• What was the most important challenge when developing this new product ? Why ?
• What other techniques/technologies did you use to power this new product?
• If you compare it to its previous generation, in what way is this product different ?
• I understand this product does <<< this and that and this >>>>. How was that functionality implemented?
• I understand it was not easy to overcome <<<problem>>>. Which design decisions did you had to make to counter <<<problem >>> ?

–        “Show” questions:

• Can you open the lid so we can have a look inside? What is the most interesting part of the design?
• Can you show me some of interesting design elements ? why is that interesting?
• Can you show me the graphical user interface of this product? Are there any new elements in the interface?
• How did we build in the reliability we want for our technology/products?
• What did you make ? What is your contribution to this product?

Questions for the marketer/product manager:

–        “Explain” questions:

• What does this product do?
• Where does this product fit into the complete customer environment?
• Can you name the 3 most important benefits for our customers? Why is that ?
• Which customers / markets / applications can benefit from this product? Why ?
• In what way is this product different than existing products?
• What’s special about this product?
• What are the 3 main features you’d like to mention? What do they mean in terms of benefits to your customers?
• Why would anybody need this product?
• When do you think it makes sense to start looking at this product?
• Is anybody using this product already today? What where the results? What benefits has that customer seen?
• What money does it save? How much?
• Where can your viewers find more information?

–        “Show” questions:

• Can you show me exactly what the product does?
• Can you show me the benefits for the end-users?
• Can you show me a typical set-up in which this technology is used?

Customer Focus – questions

Some questions you can ask during a customer interview:

• What is the business you are in?
• What products and applications are you offering to your customers?
• In what way do you feel you have a different offering than your competitors? Why is that?
• What is the biggest trend today you would say in your field? What do you think of that trend? How are your reacting to that trend?
• What do you consider the biggest challenge for your company today in these markets? Why is that?
• And in your function as << Function >>, what do you consider your biggest problem?
• And how are you answerring these challenges?
• What is the most recent interesting project that you have done? Why is that interesting?
• In which applications are you using our products? Which products?
• Why are you using our products?
• What problems where you facing, that made you choose for our products?

Event Focus – questions

Some questions you can use when shooting a video about a certain event:

• Before the event: before the event it is important for the viewer to understand WHY you are at a certain event (customer base, market relevance, application relevance). Also, WHY should he attend the event? Your Product managers, 1 single or multiple, can explain WHAT will be launched at a certain event, and WHO should be interested in a certain product, and in short WHAT it does in simple words.

Possible questions before the event

• Why are we participating / organising this event?
• Why is this event interesting?
• Why would people come to your booth / event ?
• What can they learn at this event?
• What will we show? Will people be able to discover new products or technologies? Which?
• What makes these technologies/products interesting?

• During the event:
  • Booth: during the event, several people at the booth are going around your booth and explain the different set-ups of the booth. New products AND the value to customers are covered, PR is covered including what is REMARKABLE about the PR.
  • Conference sessions: During the event it is even more important for the interviewee to share their impressions about what has catched their eye at the tradeshow (not about your company) : trending or hot topics covered during the CONFERENCE sessions, interesting new products of other players, new applications, surprising news events, etc…
  • Customer case: an employee should be able to talk about at least 1 interesting case has has heard about during the event which he can shortly explain.
  • Customer feedback: a real customer can be featured in the video that shares his impression of the show, most important things his eye catched in general or at your tradeshow booth, etc…

A lot of pictures should be taken from other booths, but also from your booth. These can be mixed into the video, or put on music.

Possible questions during the event:

• Tell me about this new product? For what is it used ? What does it do? Why is it special? What are the benefits to our customers?
• Any special functionalities that our viewers should know about?
• Where is this technology used for? Why would I want this technology?
• Is this difficult to implement?
• For which product do you get the most questions? What kind of questions do they have?

• After the event: after the event, there is an interview with the VP of sales or the CEO to recap the event. Special attention is taken care to include TRENDING topics, NEW applications, CUSTOMER stories (customer installation you have come to notice during the event). This ‘recap video’ is also made out of video material that was created before and during the event.

Possible questions after the event:

• How was <<event>> for you?
• What did your customers tell you?
• Did you come to notice any new applications / trends / news from this show?
• You’ve spoken to many customers and their business issues I presume. Is there an interesting case you want to share with us? What was their business issue? How did they solve that issue? And what was the role of your company? How has the customer benefited from that ?
• We had a few announcements at this show like <<technology>> or <<product>>. Can you tell me something more how our customers can benefit from these ?
• The announcement of <<press release of new customer deal>>, what does this mean for your customers/…

Both from engineering, marketing or sales perspective, answers to questions should pay attention to the following guidelines:

• Answers are short, to the point.
• Have fun! Nobody likes to view a stiff and too prepared video of somebody reading some text out loud.
• Do not use company jargon, UNLESS you immediately explain it.
• Make sure you always include these values for the viewers in your answers:
  • Why is it different?
  • What problem or pain does it solve?
  • Why is it better than before?
• Use drawings. A drawing or an image says more than a 1000 words they say, so we should show your products, user interfaces, technologies, …

Pfffieuwww, my longest post to date. I hope you find this post usefull. Let me know if you appreciate this one. Thanks.

Best regards,

Tom De Baere